This room was created by architect William Field in the late 1820s for Frederick William Hervey, 5th Earl and 1st Marquess of Bristol, with furnishings by Banting, France & Co, who also worked for George IV and William IV.

The 1st Marquess had inherited the half-built house in 1803 from his mercurial father, Frederick, 4rd Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry. The height of the Library, and of several other rooms in the main Rotunda, reflects the Earl-Bishop’s belief that high-ceilinged rooms kept his asthma at bay. He seems to have had a yen for circular buildings, as evident in one of his other projects, the Mussenden Temple at Downhill, Co. Londonderry.

The Earl-Bishop quarrelled with his son and out of spite left his personal fortune to a distant cousin (although he couldn’t deny him the entailed English family estates). It took the 1st Marquess until 1821 to amalgamate sufficient funds to re-start work on the house.

The curtains and upholstery in the Library were replaced in 1909-11 by Frederick William Hervey, the 4th Marquess, with green and silver damask from the Gainsborough Silk Weaving Company. The 4th Marquess also moved the Regency carved and gilded pelmet boards from the Drawing Room into the Library.

6 Responses to “The Regency library at Ickworth”

A grand treatment for an odd-shaped room, which really seems more like an additional parlor than a dedicated library. In America, Orson Fowler’s book on octagonal houses set off a building craze. Round and octagonal houses create a series of non-rectangular rooms that are hard to deal with, although obviously sheer size can be an advantage, as you demonstrate here with Ickworth.

Yes and you can see how Field has tried to mitigate the odd shape of the room with the screens of scagliola columns. I didn’t know about Orson Fowler’s 1848 book, how interesting. With the Earl-Bishop the liking for circular buildings seems to have sprung from his interest-bordering-on-obsession with classical antiquity.

Often religious people liked to have round shaped rooms because they believed that it would stop the devil from hiding in dark corners. The church in George Street in Edinburgh is an example of a round church built for this reason.

James, how interesting. In the case of Ickworth, the shape of the Rotunda seems to have been inspired purely by the ancient monuments of Rome. Moreover, although the 4th Earl was a Bishop, and eccentric, he was also a rather worldly man and more likely to be swayed by the visual impact of things rather than concerns about the Devil :)

The design for Ickworth evolved straight out of the Earl Bishop’s abandoned project for a circular building at Ballyscullion (Co. Londonderry). Ballyscullion had itself been inspired by John Plaw’s circular “Belle Isle” on Lake Windermere, which was derived from the Pantheon.

Thanks very much Anna, how interesting (Anna, by the way, is the National Trust curator advising on Ickworth, among other places). The house built by Plaw on Belle Isle in 1774 can be seen here (http://bit.ly/pzjRRz) and here (http://bit.ly/nllGmP).